by Dan Goldberg
Walter White, a Southerner with fair skin, blue eyes, and blond hair, who had led the NAACP for nearly a decade, was no stranger to the president. He had visited the White House in 1934 and 1938 in a doomed effort to have Roosevelt support an antilynching bill. The majority of White’s ancestors were white, and although the physical traits of his African ancestors were not visible, he devoted his life to championing the cause of black America.
He took his seat across from Frank Knox and Robert Patterson, assistant secretary of war and a former federal judge in New York. Secretary of War Henry Stimson, Patterson’s boss, thought integration so absurd that he boycotted the meeting. That left Patterson, a small bundle of nervous energy who was constantly chewing gum, with little to say and even less to offer.16
Knox, for his part, thought little of White, dismissing the NAACP chief as a man “constantly agitating for greater Negro recognition in the Navy” and one who should not be considered as speaking for “the Negro race in America, by any means.”17
Randolph opened the meeting by saying black men “feel they are not wanted in the armed forces of the country, and they feel they have earned the right to participate . . . by virtue of their record in past wars since the time of the Revolution.”
Randolph’s Shakespearean diction and melodic voice, a stirring basso profundo, lent gravitas to every syllable. He spoke slowly, enunciating each syllable so there could be no mistake in his meaning. In 1940, Randolph was at the height of his organizing and oratorical powers. Wartime demands for rail service had made his 35,000-member union indispensable.
He would not be charmed by Roosevelt, the master politician, and he even interrupted the commander-in-chief when he felt the president obfuscate or digress, which took no small amount of courage for a black man sitting in the Oval Office.
“The Negroes as a unit, they are feeling that they are being shunted aside, that they are being discriminated against, and that they are not wanted now,” he thundered.
There were only two black combat officers in the half-million-man Army and none in the Navy. There was not a single black soldier in the Marine Corps, Tank Corps, or Army Air Corps.
Roosevelt, who needed to assuage the civil rights leaders without alienating his military, promised Randolph that black men would make up a proportional share of the various Army units. He didn’t oppose integrating the Army, he said, and the nature of war would solve the problem without the need for proclamations from the White House.
“Now suppose you have a Negro regiment . . . here, and right over here on my right line, would be a white regiment,” the president said. “Now what happens after a while, in case of war? Those people would get shifted from one to the other. The thing gets sort of backed into.”
The Navy, however, would not be so easy.
Knox told the group that men live in close quarters aboard ships and taking “Negroes into a ship’s company . . . won’t do.”
“If you could have a Northern ship and a Southern ship it’d be different,” Roosevelt said. The president chuckled at his own joke.
No one else laughed.
Randolph asked Knox if there was single Negro officer in the Navy.
“There are 4,007 Negroes out of a total force at the beginning of 1940 of 139,000,” Knox said matter-of-factly. “They are all messman’s rank.”
Roosevelt, needing to break the tension, said he had recently been toying with the idea of having a “colored band” on ships “because they’re darn good at it.”
That way white men could become used to living with black men, and it would “increase the opportunity,” Roosevelt said. “The more of those we can get, a little opportunity here, a little opportunity there.”18
To Roosevelt, it was an attempt to crack open the door, if only a little. But the idea was paid little regard.
Stimson, writing in his diary that night, bemoaned the president’s attempts “to satisfy the Negro politicians who are trying to get the Army committed to colored officers and various other things which they ought not to do. . . . Leadership is not embedded in the Negro race yet,” Stimson wrote, “and to try to make commissioned officers to lead the men into battle is only to work disaster to both. Colored troops do very well under white officers but every time we try to lift them a little beyond where they can go, disaster and confusion follow. . . . I hope for heaven’s sake they won’t mix the white and colored troops together in the same units for then we shall certainly have trouble.”19
Knox was even more blunt. He told the president that if he were asked to desegregate the Navy, he would resign.20
Knox, the sixty-six-year-old former publisher of the Chicago Daily News, had been on the job only three months when the Oval Office meeting took place, but he harbored zero doubts that disaster would ensue if Randolph and White got their way.
From the moment he was sworn in, Knox was determined to make the Navy more efficient, and that meant finding out what his admirals wanted and ensuring that it got done. And when it came to integrating the Navy, Knox knew his admirals wanted nothing to do with it and he saw no reason to question their wisdom.
Less than two weeks after Knox’s confirmation, the Bureau of Navigation, responsible for personnel matters, prepared for him a letter explaining to New York’s lieutenant governor, Charles Poletti, that black men were incapable of discipline and that to integrate ships was to invite discord.
Knox accepted these assertions without protest, and quickly warmed to the reasoning. “It is no kindness to Negroes to thrust them upon men of the white race,” he told Senator Arthur Capper, a stolid seventy-five-year-old Republican from Kansas, just a few weeks after his appointment. Black men, he suggested, could contribute to the defense effort in the Army.21
Knox was so reliant on his admirals’ judgment and experience because he had so little of his own. He had never served in the Navy and knew nothing about fighting a naval war. He wasn’t even much of sailor.22 He was easily impressed by officers who whispered the mathematical secrets of gunnery, romanticized life on the high seas, and explained the latest technological innovations aboard modern ships.23
But despite his inexperience, Knox established an easy rapport with the top brass. He invited them to golf and he cursed like a sailor.24 He called admirals by their first names, or nicknames, a habit from his newspaper days, as was his tendency to call the Navy Department “the shop.”25 The husky, deep-voiced, and usually even-tempered Knox was intelligent without being intellectual, and had a much-admired common-man touch born of his humble upbringing and his days as a newsman.26
He did not look his age, and his vitality and dynamism betrayed no secrets. The only sign that this man was midway through his seventh decade was the wispy strands of thinning hair that clung to his fleshy head. Full faced with a prominent nose, the bespectacled secretary earned his admirals’ admiration by keeping a “sharp division” between administrative tasks and military functions, and he let it be known that he thought the worst secretaries made the mistake of assuming their appointment endowed them with “professional skill in the strategy of war.”
“Any layman would be a damn fool to get himself mixed up in the professional business of trying to fight a naval war,” Knox told friends. “My job is to find out what the top admirals want to put across, talk it over with them and then do my damnedest to see that the job gets done as economically and efficiently as possible.”27
Knox’s lack of naval experience was only the second-most surprising fact about his nomination. Far more dumbfounding to the political class was that Knox had been the vice-presidential nominee on the Republican ticket in 1936, a campaign he had spent berating Roosevelt. A hagiographic biography, intended to introduce Knox to the country, had declared that he “was the first great editor in the nation to point out the hidden menace in the New Deal.”28
He was also early to realize the dangers of Hitler’s aggression, which is why he was tapped to replace the dimmer-witted Charles Edison, who had infuria
ted Roosevelt when he refused a direct order to send needed supplies to England and France.29
Roosevelt needed a Navy secretary who not only appreciated the Nazi threat but also could help ready a woefully unprepared nation for war. In Knox, the president found an eloquent defender of democracy, and a man whose lack of Navy know-how was more than made up for by his managerial acumen.
Knox’s knack was put to quick use. Among his very first moves, he pressured the Civil Service Commission to hire 2,200 additional clerks who could process requests from the scattered fleet and bases. No longer were pleas left lingering on desks. Knox ordered that every person’s desk must be clear before he or she left for home at night.30
Following the advice of Edwin G. Booz, a shaggy, slow-speaking, efficiency expert with the business consulting firm Booz, Fry, Allen & Hamilton, Knox also put in separate switchboards for the Army and the Navy so phone calls meant for admirals were no longer sent to generals. He placed receptionists at the entrance to the Navy’s headquarters so tourists couldn’t roam the halls while the nation prepared for war.
“We must become intolerant of delay,” he told his staff. “We must tear our way through red tape. We must pillory bureaucrats who stupidly sacrifice time in the pursuit of an impossible perfection.”31
It was a role perfectly suited to Knox, who, while working for William Randolph Hearst, had earned a reputation as a boss who could pinch pennies—or find efficiencies, as it is often called. He removed the free Kotex from the newspaper’s ladies’ rooms and decreed that before any reporter received a new pencil, he had to turn in the stub of the old one.32
The papers profited.
Knox was on the golf course on June 20, 1940, pivoting his “beefy buttocks into powerful drives” and cursing himself as “yellow” for being short on his putts, as he habitually was, when his nomination as Navy secretary was announced.
Publicly, Knox made the case that his decision to accept the nomination was about patriotism, not politics: “I am an old soldier [who] has fought in two wars and if my Commander in Chief gave me a rifle and told me to start out again as a buck private, I’d do it,” he said. “I am an American first and a Republican after that.”33
Privately, Knox was wary, admitting to his new boss that he was “one of the most active, and I fear sometimes cantankerous, critics of your domestic program.”34
No worries, said Roosevelt. They were aligned on Europe and that’s what mattered. “You and I will wish many times that we could eat some of the things we said about each other in 1936.”35
The nation’s new Navy secretary began his days with a deep breath of fresh air, which he gulped next to the open window in his suite at Washington’s Wardman Park Hotel, where he made his home. Then he did squats in his pajamas, stretched his torso, and circled his arms before taking a “relaxed trot” around the apartment.36
He was in the office by 9 a.m., sitting behind an always orderly desk holding few trinkets save for a bust of Teddy Roosevelt, his commanding officer when he served with the Rough Riders and a lifelong hero. Knox required all bureau chiefs and heads of offices who needed his signature to come to his office personally and be prepared to explain the document’s significance. In this way he became acquainted with high-ranking officers and their problems.37
So even though he had been on the job only three months by late September, when he met with Randolph and White in the Oval Office, he knew well how the men under his command felt about integration, and he would defend their interests.
Burdening the Navy when it had such a monumental task ahead would be an inefficient use of time and resources, and Knox was, if nothing else, all about efficiency.
Knox’s efforts to head off opportunity for African Americans were deliberate; meanwhile, however, the march toward war was having a less intended but no less deleterious effect on opportunities for thousands across the country, including a twenty-four-year-old sheet-metal worker living in Washington, North Carolina, named George Clinton Cooper.
By the end of 1940, Cooper was struggling to find work. Metal was available for defense contractors but not for maintenance and upkeep of homes, which was Cooper’s livelihood.
He had a new bride to provide for and needed steady employment, so when he read in the newspaper that a National Youth Administration facility had opened in Ohio and was in need of a sheet-metal instructor, he sent his application. That the facility was at Wilberforce University, the alma mater of his wife, Peg, made the prospect seem like destiny. He was invited to interview for a position as senior foreman, teaching aircraft sheet-metal work. Cooper, excited for his future, made the six-hundred-mile trek.
When he arrived, the supervisor looked at the young man quizzically.
“Somebody made a mistake,” he said.
“What do you mean?” Cooper replied.
“I’m going to be perfectly honest with you. We thought you were white.”
“I thought you were looking for a sheet-metal instructor,” Cooper said.
“We are. I am going to be honest with you again. I’ve never seen a colored sheet-metal worker. I just don’t believe you can do the job.”
Cooper was pragmatic and congenial by nature. He insisted his credentials were solid and told the supervisor that he had traveled all the way from North Carolina.
“You have, in fact, come a long way,” said the supervisor. “I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I don’t really believe you can do this job, but we have a fully equipped shop here. I will give you a set of blueprints for a simple thing like a metal locker, and if you can make one in a week, I’ll give you the job.”
Cooper thought that unfair but accepted the offer.
Two days later, he presented his locker, which he had built with the help of three students.
“I thought you were going to take a week,” the supervisor said.
“No, that was your suggestion. I didn’t say how long it was going to take me to do it.”
The job was his.38
Cooper was unfazed by the supervisor because he was used to that kind of attitude. Racism and even violence had been as much a part of his North Carolina upbringing as the Pamlico and Tar Rivers, which bordered the southern part of Washington, the small town where he was born on September 7, 1916.
Washington, like so many Southern cities and towns, was strictly segregated. Cooper first became aware of race when he was in kindergarten. His class had only black children. He knew there were white children in town. He had even, on occasion, played with them in the tobacco fields.39 Where were they now, he wondered.
His father, Edward Cooper, owned a successful sheet-metal shop and earned a reasonable living. His mother, Laura Jane Johnson, tended to the home, which included several gardens whose produce supplemented the diet of their eleven children.
Edward Cooper was considered “one of the most outstanding Black citizens [who] ever lived in Washington.” When electricity came to Washington, he made the tin ornaments and stars for the town’s very first illuminated Christmas tree.40 The Coopers were one of the first black families in town to own a radio, and many nights were passed sitting around this miracle machine that brought the sounds of professional baseball, the comedy of Amos ’n’ Andy, and the voice of the president of the United States into their very own home.
The elder Cooper, who had moved to Washington from Pactolus, North Carolina, in 1890, never made it past the fourth grade, but he became an avid reader. He was a stern, formal man who kept a library in his home; in its center there was a piano, which he insisted all his children learn to play.41
Cooper’s mother had never made it past the third grade and never learned to read, but Miss Laura, as everyone in the neighborhood called her, was a savvy businesswoman who boosted the family’s income selling milk, vegetables, and occasionally a chicken. During the Great Depression, Miss Laura, a rotund, solemn-looking woman, would often tell her son to drop in on a neighbor with a package of food. “I know she needs it,” she would say.
“Just tell her Miss Laura sent it.”42
She was also the disciplinarian. Backtalk or disobedience was cured with a wet dishcloth across the face. If one of the Cooper children did something wrong at school, he or she would be whipped by a teacher. And if word got home that they had been whipped at school, they could expect another whipping at home.
Washington, which the Coopers always referred to as “little Washington” to distinguish it from the more prestigious city on the Potomac, was a fairly typical small town. A horse-drawn cart would bring wood already cut to fit the stove. In a woodhouse beside the kitchen surplus wood was laid and could be axed down to smaller chips when needed. Behind the Cooper home was a four-holer outhouse, which had different size holes to accommodate growing children. The homes in town were built on stilts and pilasters because of the tides—high enough for kids to crawl under and hide when they were playing games, looking for shade on a hot day, or running from a whipping. Teenage boys and girls, feeling the pull of innocent love or, more often, the pangs of irrepressible lust, would walk back and forth across the three-quarter-mile-long bridge that spanned the Pamlico River and, perhaps, share an ice cream cone from the drug store.
Like the Arbors and countless other African American parents who were the children of slaves, the Coopers wanted more for the next generation than they had had for themselves, and that meant insisting on their children’s education. All of the Cooper children graduated from college.
“You’ve got to have something upstairs to make it,” his parents would say.